moonlight making crosses on your body
by verity candor
Summary: and me putting my mouth on every one. - richard siken /thirty-three next gen het pairings for the 'captaining the next gen armada' challenge on the ngf forum. m for underage sex, drugs, and language
1. Chapter 1

pairing: teddyvictoire

warnings: underage sex

* * *

It's like this:

You're fifteen, and beauty sneaks over your skin like the eyes of a stranger. People say you've grown into yourself (with this terrifyingly proud air) but it's more like you've grown out of yourself - someone's stolen away your comfortable body, with its knobby knees and overlarge smile, and left behind some luminous woman, who catches the glances of men twice your age and has doors opened and "Ladies first" murmured at her bright hair, while you, the real you, quail under the new gleam in their eyes.

You hide behind old shapeless skirts and your father's ratty jumpers, while the new blue dress you got for your birthday crouches in the back of your closet, its hemline skimming the imaginary knees of the luminous woman. You are fifteen, and you want to talk to your mother, but she is so poised and perfect that you are afraid your fear will disappoint her. You want your father to make it better, but his eyes have looked at you the same way since you were four, and forcing him to change the way thinks of you is frightening in its own way.

There is only one other person in the house whose cloud of misery and uncertainty matches yours, and you are drawn together like falling stars to earth.

It's also like this:

You are sixteen and you have lost everything.

You've never had your parents, but your grandmother died last week in her sleep, and it never occurred to you that you would have to live without her. You're not alone, and you should be thankful, but you're not. This is family, too, but it's not yours.  
It would be easier if you could be angry with her, at least, but you were there, you watched the years rack up on her face, crowd into wrinkles like lead weights, and all you have left to feel is hope, that this is what she's wanted.

You wander ghost-like through someone else's house by the sea until your godparents can get home, wanting to be furious, but not, wanting to be anywhere but here, but not, wanting to be where your parents are, where your grandmother is, wanting, mainly, to know why everyone always leaves you behind.

You are fifteen, and a boy you haven't seen since he came to your tenth birthday party and tried not to let his hair turn black when they raised a toast to the fallen has let his hair turn black, and his eyes, too (and you wonder if perhaps that color has seeped beneath his skin, into his bloodstream and his heart.)

And on a night, dark like his eyes, you walk into his bedroom, which used to be yours, you walk over and lay on the bed like you can reclaim it, like you can wade back into the territory where your childhood sank into the ground and leave your footsteps there, even after you catch the glint of starlight in his black eyes.

You are sixteen, and a girl with eyes like the sea and hair like the shore, a girl you gave daisies to one day when you were five, stands at the door of your bedroom like she was borne out of the water toward you.

When you push yourself up on your arms to make sure she's real, her eyes flick to your face, and her mouth opens like she's about to say something, but she doesn't. She curls into herself at the edge of your bed, and when you lean close to her, you kiss her because her mouth is the devastated landscape you have wandered in for days.

You are fifteen and a boy like a night without stars kisses you. You've never been kissed before, but after you contract, you arch into his mouth thinking Yesyesyes, because finally, it is so dark that even you have forgotten what you look like.

You are fifteen, and when he reaches a shivering hand to your leg, you close your eyes and your hand over his wrist.

You are sixteen and a sea-girl has caught your wrist, the same wrist she bit when you were eight, and you'd teased her one time too many for being taller than you, even though you were a whole year older.

You are sixteen, and you stop moving because she has caught a part of you that is eight, a part that was old enough to have a grandmother. You meet her eyes, and swallow because you are sixteen. Over the crest of a curled up breath, you whisper, "What are we doing?"

You are fifteen, and a boy with eyes turned the startling grey of the sea before sunrise asks you a question you don't want to answer. So you don't. You open your eyes as wide as they go and lean up until his breath is stretched thin as a wire. "I don't care." you say, and when he leans into you again, and you feel a buzz up your arms - satisfaction and surprise curling in your palms, that it could take only your eyes and these three words to make him do what you want.

You are sixteen, and you are curled into the empty spaces where a sea-girl has slipped herself out of her skin. But she's not a sea-girl. She's called Victoire and when she whispered to you a thrill ran down your skin and juddered into your skull. You are sixteen and you know she hasn't slipped out of her skin because you can feel it under your hands.

You are fifteen, and the hook of your bra is caught in your hair. It is blue with snatches of white flowers, and when he accidentally grinds his heel against your foot, you say "Teddy," in what isn't a scolding tone, because your heartbeat is caught within his eyes, is pounding along his fingers. Something spins a little in you and you should be more scared or less sad, but you are both and neither.

You are sixteen and a girl with streams of buttery hair is dropping unexpected kisses against the side of your face and the corner of your mouth. You open your eyes and she looks so earnest, so honest, like she is trying to tell you something, but isn't sure what.

You are sixteen and tomorrow, your grandmother will still be dead.

You are fifteen, and a boy cupped between your knees is changing his shape, right under your hands. Hands that were - a second ago - awkward knuckled and young are thin and distinguished, a pianist's fingers, the hands of a violist, playing you like an instrument. You nip at one of his fingers and then they are hard and muscled as he stretches and leaves a grunt in your collarbone. He moves his hand and drops a mark like a flower over your hipbone.

You are sixteen, and your body is out of your control as it hasn't been since you were two and didn't understand why you had to stop changing. You are clanging and sticking and melting. You are coming undone.

You are fifteen, and a boy with hands shifting to the tune of a song you've never heard is is leaving tears in your hair. You say his name because you can, because it makes you feel like you are stronger than someone who needs you.

You are fifteen and a boy unraveling in front of you is sticking you together in a way you didn't know you wanted to be remade.

You are sixteen and you are between a sea-girl's legs, between her mouth and her throat, between her teeth and her hands, between her butter-bright hair and your bedsheets.

You are sixteen, and you are between alone and anew, between the sea and the air.

You are fifteen, and your hands are on a boy who is making you feel luminous. You are touching a boy who is is taking away your knobby knees. He left a purpling flower on your hip. He gave back your overlarge smile.

You are sixteen, and you are between two mornings of your life. One of them has your grandmother gone and one of them has you here; one of them has the sea and one of them has the land.

You are sixteen. Your grandmother is dead. You are not.

You are fifteen; tomorrow will slip into you with a scoop of sunshine. You are fifteen, and you will wear a blue dress that skims your knees like sea-foam. You will flip your hair over your shoulder and smile over the breakfast table at a boy with hair that is brown like wet sand on the shore.


	2. Chapter 2

pairing: dominiquelorcan

warnings: drug usage by minors

a/n: I didn't think I'd be doing any poetry for this collection but here is a freeverse. Oops?

* * *

_dear so-and-so, _  
_i'm sorry i came to your party and seduced you_

I should be taller you think  
taller and taller and big as the sky

but you are tiny

tiny by the green and in front of the green  
(You can't remember what you took)  
the ghosts are made of smoke tonight  
the smoke is all of ghosts tonight  
and the ghost is only single ghost  
the ghost is the ghost and smoke is her hair  
somebody left their teeth in your mouth

You run your dry tongue over them and they are familiar  
(iliarliarliarliar)  
same old teeth fit in at the wrong angle  
things are skating between your hands weaving your hands together knotting your fingers together and if they are not real they are pretty so

so

the stars are writing names in the sky  
but the streaks are too bright  
and so bright  
they well tears in your eyes

you can't read the words in the sky but if you could you have some idea of who they would say  
you have  
_some_ -

angry is like clouds (angry for names and stars and ghosts)  
angry is in you heavy and smeared  
and you want the smeared in the sky in the words the stars wordstars  
but your fingers

are knotted together  
everything is together but you here alone  
alone on the edge, on the  
the promontory  
(And you can't remember what you took)  
there are things dancing between your fingers and the sky swirling the stars into your mouth  
you choke  
and the stars  
between your hands and the stars a face is pushing its profile into the sky  
catching under its eyelid a star which shines  
a century ago something was in your mouth

you nicked it out of someone's hand at a party and in your mouth it filled it with stars  
a whole century and time is the river and it took you

and all that happened is the stars spun into you and drummed

drummed a halo around your head  
you, rundown angel, the stars are beating beating a drumbeat a tattoo into your eardrums your head your skin  
blink the lights away the tattoo is beating on your hands your skin  
inked on your skin  
the story is as new as the sky with its living stars and their endless eyes  
how can you sleep with your eyes filled with eyes  
you can't sleep with your stars filled with eyes  
slow blanket of dust-eyed, dusty darkness sweeping in to keep you warned from the winter-cold (Can you feel your fingers can you feel)  
someone

(how can you shut your eyes if they are drowned in dreams how can you sleep if your skin is dreams)

someone loved you and lost you no  
someone with blood and roses and gold in her hair  
her mouth dry and her lips chapped  
feeding you desert sand and the barren glare of the sun there  
someone with her hands stretching dreams and blunt nails and dirt under them  
with her teeth  
her teeth on you  
you loved someone and lost someone you loved her and she lost you  
no  
you are skipping on the edge of the stars  
no one loves you and the stars ate you so you are lost  
too  
(And you can't remember)  
(you can't)


	3. Chapter 3

pairing: rosescorpius

* * *

Monday morning finds Rose tearing apart photographs in her kitchen. Edward Boot, Wizarding Britain's second most eligible bachelor (after her cousin Albus, as Rose has always made a point to remind him) is as distinguished and full of humor as always in them, and only the truly keen-eyed might see the fine lines showing how many times she has torn and repaired the same photos before.

They've fought and fucked and cried and laughed and smashed their way through six years of a relationship. The only thing that has changed is that this time Rose has pushed the boundaries too far. "You're no good for me," he had said to her, voice choked, "You're just - not good."

Rose Weasley is a raw nerve ending, a piece of the universe stewing in feelings and a primal desire to take what she wants and give nothing away. Rose Weasley is a throbbing impulse, beating in rhythm with some electric stimulus she can't see, swinging to and fro to the sound of bells no one else can hear.

Rose Weasley is crying in the kitchen.

"I can't do it without you, I can't do it alone, I can't I can't, I'm scared," she is saying, tearing his face apart, "Please."

Rose Weasley swings in cyclic orbit with whatever, anything she can wind her fingers into, because otherwise she'd swing herself into the dark, all alone.

Six of her cousins have knocked on her door by Wednesday, three try the Floo, and it's Friday before she gets herself out of the house.

First, the necessaries: her face Transfigured- disguised from the papers- then, the groceries, milk. And then as many empty streets as she can lead her empty heart into.

Montadder's Magical Bookstore is a tiny storefront she finds on the very edge of Diagon Alley. A handful of people mill around inside, and Rose follows a smiling couple through the doors. The store is as innocuous inside as it seemed from outside, a handful of aged spellbooks and a shelf carrying an eclectic mix of magical new releases and a sketchy few stacks plucked from the Muggle bestsellers lists. She runs her fingers over the books, remembering being seventeen and wearing Slytherin robes, reading and reading because only books seemed to understand how illformed and enormous her desires were. And meeting Ed, who'd smirked at her, infuriated her and, despite it, understood her.

She reaches out jerkily and snatches two books off the shelf, stalking over to the counter to pay before anything else crawls out of her mind and through the bookshelves.

The wizard at the counter's hands catch her eyes first, the distant, haphazard way he folds books into brown paper before passing them off. There is something familiar in the cast of his face, so she turns away, before remembering that she is wearing a false, blonde face. She can look at him if she wants to. She doesn't want to. She keeps her eyes on his long fingers while he produces her parcel of books, and hands him her seven Sickles, four Knuts without looking up.

Rose is not a kind woman. She was a Magical Advocate for only four years before she trampled enough livelihoods to become more of a liability than an asset. The column at the Prophet had, shockingly, been less public than that.

She could have returned to Hart and Proxy after the paid leave, but even she had felt the slightest tinge of embarrassment at how unwanted she was.  
This, some part of her reasons, is just a different kind of unwanted.

She unpacks her books at home to find that she has chosen a Wizard's Cuisine: Francais! cookbook and a slim romance by some strange author who writes about love between a wizard and a cyborg singer in a futuristic opera.

She is interested in spite of herself and churns out three of the recipes in the cookbook as she reads, then re-reads it.

It's not the first book listed in the author's bibliography, and Rose takes it as a private puzzle - tracing the author's works back to the beginning, finding the earliest seed of the themes and patterns which resurface in each successive novel.

She returns to Montadder's, and finds, to her pleasure, a neat boxset sitting behind the shelf where she found the first book. She's wearing a midnight black disguise today, dark hair, dark eyes, dark robes.

The cashier pauses a moment when he sees her, and Rose is afraid he recognizes her.

"Do I know you?" she says carelessly, hoping to embarrass him into forgetting her.

There's another pause, and then he says, "Rose Weasley?" and she jumps.

"What - Who are you?"she asks, urgently, too surprised to stay discreet, to deny it.

"Scorpius Malfoy," he says, and Rose is surprised all over again.

She says, "Oh." and he says, "It was your ring, by the way," he gestures in a very vague way, his eyes dropping away from hers. She realizes a second later - her mother's ruby ring, her grandmother's before that. She'd slipped it on that morning, bare minutes before leaving.

"You hit me when we were fifteen," he adds, "So I have reason to remember." She'd worn the ring all through school, from the moment it arrived with Albert the owl after her Sorting had happened. It had seemed terribly important.

Rose is still scrambling, but he seems quite finished, passing the parcel to her as if he hadn't seen through her disguise as easily as if through glass.  
"What are you doing here?" she manages, and he shrugs idly, something less than carefree in the set of his shoulders. She can't remember hitting him - she barely remembers him at all.

"Part-time. Twenty hours a week." he says, and turns to the next person in line.

Rose doesn't open the boxset, which sits, still wrapped, on her table when she gets home. She curls up around herself in the window seat and wonders about the worth of disguises if she can be recognized underneath them. She is, quite honestly, galled that she was recognized, not from some inherent Rose-ness which was beneath the disguise, but on the strength of a throwaway trinket.

Who remembers a ring for fifteen years? She thinks to herself irritably. She still can barely recall him from their school years. He'd been Sorted into Ravenclaw, she knows, because Albus had marveled over it half their First Year, but that's all she recalls.

No, that's not true: there had been some some Runes scholarship, some shade of intelligence, brilliance which had clung to his name, faintly. She still can't think of any reason she had to hit him when she was fifteen.

And what kind of answer is part-time-twenty-hours-week anyway? She had meant - something different, more something like, why here, why a bookstore, where is your life. People did not pass through brilliance and come out haphazardly folding books into parcels.

She returns the next day, wearing her own face, and walks up to him, and waits, staring. She expects him to ignore her quite handily, for the rhythm of his movement to remain unchanged.

A brittle stiffness crawls up his hands, and the folds of the paper grow sharper and more haphazard as she watches. Rose hadn't considered that he didn't want to be recognized either.

"What can I help you with?" he says, tone still mild. There is something hunted, a little wildness in his eyes, the set of his mouth.

Rose stops when she recognizes it. A rippling itch runs through her fingers. She'd come with questions prepared, innocent ones - do you have Viola Goldstein's first book? Do you have another branch?

"Do you have there a back room?" she asks instead, "Somewhere private?"

There is a lock on the back room, thankfully. Scorpius throws a tarp over the scattered stacks of books in the storage room.

"Really?" Rose asks, askance.

"Don't you think it'd be unsanitary?" he asks, "We do plan on selling those."

It's unsanitary all the same - Rose rakes her nails across his back and he bites her to keep from making a sound. There's nothing tender about it - it's a very clinical fuck. She leaves with a fairy ring of red sunk into her shoulder. He leaves to get lunch.

Rose knows that she has done worse things, but later, staring at herself in the mirror, Rose wonders how many of them she has felt this stupid about. The red marks on her skin make her look subtly different in the evening light - fey, not quite human.

It suits her, she thinks, and goes back the next day.

"Good thing we have magic." Scorpius mutters, four days after they start stealing into the dim back room. He is peering at the, by now, very unsanitary tarp over her shoulder. Rose is very tired of the tarp.

On the fourteenth day after they started fucking, she perversely goes grocery shopping at three, when they usually meet, and buys, on impulse, three sprigs of lavender and rutabagas. She's slowly beginning to field Lily and Hugo's Floo calls, still avoiding tabloids, carefully unearthing her life from the hollows of Ed's lack.

She doesn't reach the store until very late - almost seven, closing time. Scorpius is not at all nonplussed to see her, shooting a even look at her as he packs up spellbooks for a final client.

"My shift is almost over, can you wait?" he says. Having made him wait all day, Rose is irritated at the casual way he makes her do the same. She wanders around the stacks for twenty minutes until he appears at the other end of a bookcase and says, "I'm actually going to close up - but my flat isn't far, if you don't mind."

Rose doesn't, particularly, but she purses her lips anyway, and stalks past him with as much dignity as her bag of rutabagas plus lavender allows.  
His flat, she finds, reflects the glimpse of desperation, the feral something in his eyes that drove her into Montadder's back room in the first place. Snow drifts of papers are strewn over the floor, piled into stacks on the tables, scattered over the stove. Large diagrams hang suspended in midair, with frantic scrawls crisscrossing throughout. Three sets of silverware sit on the table, with three plates of half eaten food cooling beside them. The entire flat smells musty, like wet paper improperly dried.

Rose turns an astonished gaze on him. She would have imagined that he kept his flat as tidy as the bookstore's back room.

"You don't find this unsanitary?" she asks.

"I don't have sex that much." he says, bolting the door as he turns around.

"You're probably not having any today." she says, and raps her wand sharply against the table. The plates rise up and balance on the forks and spoons, which arrange themselves like stilts and waltz, literally, into the kitchen. She waves her wand in the direction of the kitchen sink, where the taps turn on and soapsuds erupt in a fountain of white.

"Did you make that spell?" he asks her.

"No." she says, looking back at the flat.

He catches Rose staring and waves his hand. "They're Celtic." he says, as if that explains anything.

Scorpius Malfoy lives in a daydream, she realizes, lives on a page of a book, in days that have already run away or will never quite meet him again. This is his life, she thinks, leaning against the kitchen counter. This is where it went.

"So you're freelance?" she asks him. He makes a face.

"Yes. I guess. I was at the Ministry," he adds, a little defensively, "The funding ran out, so no need for Runic translators, etc. etc." He waves a hand again, and Rose wonders if that is a habit, if he is embarrassed or sad or neither.

Rose says, "Do you have any chicken?"

She makes _poulet a la lavande_ and puts the extra servings away with a Freezing Charm. She slices the rutabagas up on a whim and throws them in the pan to soak up the sauce. Scorpius hovers on the edge of the kitchen as though it has transformed without his permission, and he's been left standing on the edge between worlds.

"Do you have Viola Goldstein's first novel?" Rose asks him.

He blinks at her. "Yes." he says without hesitating. "Are you going to buy it?"

"Yes." she says without hesitating, as the chicken floats out of the pan onto the clean plates from the sink.

She gets an unsigned owl after a few days which says _Changing shifts six in the am - 2pm_

She stays home for a while, spends a week reading, and briefly entertains the idea of owling Ed. Her hand hangs over the page three minutes, five, ten. _How are you_ seems inadequate,_ I miss you_ seems cruel. The boxset of Viola Goldstein's books is absorbing - there are fewer cyborgs in the earlier novels; one takes place in a fairytale, where a cursed villager and a prince in disguise chase each other through an enchanted wood and fall in love.

She thinks about people in disguise for a long time. It occurs to her for the first time to wonder why Scorpius was looking at her hands at all, the first day in the shop.

After the next time they have sex, she lifts herself up on her elbow and stares down at Scorpius, where his hands are, spread out beside him. After she looks for a second, she finds what she is searching for. She reaches for his hand. He flinched away from her fingers, and she gives him a very level stare before she touches the imprint on his finger, where a ring has not been for some time.

"So what happened?" she says. His eyes trail down to their not-quite joined hands and he lifts his eyes back up to the ceiling.

"My - well, ex-fiancée. She didn't show up, at our wedding."

Rose sighs and drops back to the bed. "My boyfriend," she tells him, "You probably guessed."

"I figured it was something like me. You know what she said to me?"

"Should I guess?" Rose asks.

"Said I was so involved in loving her, I didn't know anything about her at all, anymore." Scorpius speaks as though the words are being pushed through his throat. He turns to her, something turning easy in the line of his throat. "What did yours say?"

Rose swallows, "You're no good for me."

Scorpius lets out a "Merlin," on a half laugh. His smile is a very bright thing, it makes him unexpectedly handsome. "Good for him? That's a stupid thing to expect, from people like us."

"He was good for me." Rose says.

"Yeah," Scorpius says, almost indifferently, "At least _we_ know how to pick the good ones."

The next time she goes to see Scorpius, she Floos there directly. She has a box of_ boeuf en croute_ with her that ought to last a day or two, at least.

"Oh, good, you're here." she says, seeing him perched on the table with a stack of translations.

"Well, it's four." he says, looking slightly cornered.

She still hasn't managed a letter to Ed, yet, but she has started writing something else - a little story, a gift for herself, about a Wicked Witch in the woods. She imagines a prince will be along eventually; a princess has already found herself with an impossible quest.

"I brought your book," he gestures behind her, to the mantel.

"Isn't it a fire hazard to have this much paper near a lit fire?" Rose says, and then, "Thanks."

"I put a shield in front of the fire," Scorpius says. He leans over his parchment as though he's working, except his quill doesn't move. "Why Viola Goldstein, really?" he starts abruptly. It's the first thing resembling passion Rose has seen from him, "For you, at least. I would have thought -" and she says, "Go on."

"Thought something - more blunt, more martial." Scorpius says, "All that - loving someone in spite of their flaws business -"

"Letting yourself," Rose interrupts, and then, after a second, more quietly, adds, "be loved. In spite of your flaws."

A part of her mind is rolling over the word 'martial,' wondering how much surprise she should feel that Scorpius looks at her and sees a battlefield. A much larger portion is turning back the look that Scorpius is giving her, the one that says '_I'm learning how little I understand you._"

"You've read them?" she asks him. Scorpius drops his eyes from her face, rubbing a hand against the parchment.

"Of course. All of them." he says.

"Of course," she says. "Okay."

He looks back up at her. They clear out a spot among the papers on the floor - Scorpius sends her an incredulous glare when she asks if they are important - and Rose has to cast a Warming Charm on the ground underneath. She adds a Cushioning Charm for good measure.

"You're terrible at magic, for a Ravenclaw." she tells him, while she's unhooking her bra.

"Hey, Ravenclaws seek knowledge. No one said we have to be good at using it. Here, let me." he says, reaching for the clasp.

Rose lets him, thinking about his hands.

She turns around when she hears a suspicious rumble, and finds he's smiling at her. "Sorry - I haven't eaten."

She was right about his smile; it grows into the brightest thing in the room when she sighs and goes for the _boeuf en croute_.

Scorpius' eyelids start drooping almost right after they finish. Rose only laughs a little when he falls asleep on the the little island of warm ground, and winds her arms around her legs as she stares into the shifting flames.

One day, she thinks, she believes, looking again at Scorpius' sleeping figure, she'll finally go to see Ed, after she convinces the Prophet to give her a cooking column, after she writes a bestselling children's book, and Ed will look at her way he always has, but instead of_ Always you_, he will say_ I can't,_ and this time Rose will be able to tell him, _Yes, I know_. Or he'll come to see her, hand in hand with someone else, and she might even say _Thank you_.

After six years loving him, of being loved like a thunderstorm, she, finally, at last, understands Ed. She reaches for Scorpius a little idly, seeking comfort, only to find him already awake, watching her cry.

There's something in the way he looks at her that she can't understand, so shuts her eyes over the pearls of her tears as he sits up to curl protectively over her. He presses his lips to her forehead.

"We'll tear ourselves apart, probably. But I'm trying," she says, thinking again about his hands, his runes, his wild scrawl, his empty finger, "To know you first.". He ducks his head down to her level, looking nearly apologetic.  
"I've - broken things, too." he whispers, "But if you want to - I will, too." and Rose wants to break all her promises, to make him keep his.


End file.
